I wrote recently about the silly contemporary myth that portrays Christianity as implacably opposed to science and progress. The legend is thoroughly disproved by an abundance of counterexamples, but some of the available correctives are so powerfully convincing that they startle, and it is odd that Christian apologists have not used them more freely against...
Category: Columns
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Success(ion)
The lifeblood of Chronicles is Tom Fleming, who took the reins of an interesting magazine in 1985 and turned it into an indispensable publication for anyone concerned about the future of this country. But the magazine that you hold in your hands today also owes its current form—and perhaps even its continued existence—in no small...
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Wisdom and Science
Societies live by their mythologies, which become so passionately held that it’s usually risky to challenge them. Having said that, one major component of contemporary secularist mythology really has to be confronted, because it is so influential, so widely reflected in even the saner mass media, and so totally wrong. I’m referring to the familiar...
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The Betsy Ross of California
Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed legislation requiring public schools to teach students about the contributions of “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.” When I was young, we were taught about men and, yes, women in California, not because of their “sexual orientation” but because they were figures of substance and significance. One of my favorites...
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Goodbye, Britannia
I first visited England in 1953, when I was 16 years old. It was a very different country back then, a green and pleasant place, where weekend cinemas were packed with enthusiastic movie fans all cheerfully whistling and applauding the action. The film palaces were thick with tobacco smoke, and no one left his seat...
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The Capitalist Nonesuch
When the first of the truly modern “modern politicians” straddled the front page, even the meliorism junkies of the New York Times deemed it proper to lament the creature’s arrival and to bemoan its lack of substance. But the journalists, as always, had no clue. In an age when money is not only paper but...
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The Hollywood Horror
My wife does not like horror films. I used to think it was because she does not wish to be frightened, but we all, even prim Victorian ladies, enjoy a good scare from time to time, especially when we know we are safe. Girl Scouts around the campfire tell stories about the murdered little girl...
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Lessons of Libya
Liberal interventionists and their neoconservative twins on both sides of the Atlantic were jubilant as Libyan rebels took Tripoli. From now on, “The right question for the United States and its allies isn’t whether to help oppressed people fight for freedom, it’s when,” declared the Washington Post on August 24. The answer to that question...
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Carrying the Burden
The Help Produced by Dreamworks Pictures Directed and written by Tate Taylor from Kathryn Stockett’s novel Distributed by Walt Disney Studios The Guard Produced by Reprisal Films Directed and written by John McDonagh Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics I went to see The Help fully expecting it would be a travesty of race relations...
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Under an Honorable Spell
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures Directed by David Yates Screenplay by Steve Kloves, from J.K. Rowling’s novel I took my son Liam to the first Harry Potter movie ten years ago, so I thought it only proper to let him take me to the...
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Running in Circles
The esteemed editor of this magazine was not at all persuaded by my discussion of Twitter in the first installment of this new column (“Weiners and Losers,” September). I would have been more than a bit disappointed if it had been otherwise. Though I have been using Twitter in various ways for over four years...
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A Magical September
On September 1, 1957, a pretty French girl by the name of Patricia and an Italo-French couple, Feruccio and Ellen, joined me in the old harbor of Cannes waiting to board the super-new luxury liner Cristoforo Colombo. Our destination was Capri, and we had decided to go on the spur of the moment. Capri’s season...
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Arabian Fall
In the U.S. mainstream media, the developments that have followed the misnamed “Arab Spring” have been curiously underreported. The reason seems clear: In recent weeks those developments have taken a clear turn away from Western-style democracy, pluralism, tolerance, respect for human rights, etc. It now seems obvious that the turmoil has undermined the region’s authoritarian...
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Peace With Zulus
Like most literate Brits of my generation, I grew up immersed in the book 1066 and All That, the brilliant parody of historical writing published in 1930 by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman. Among the large chunks of the book I can still recite verbatim is the catalogue of Victorian colonial wars, which mimics with...
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Modernists Amuck
The Tree of Life Produced by Cottonwood Pictures and River Road Entertainment Written and directed by Terrence Malick Distributed by Fox Searchlight Entertainment Midnight in Paris Produced by Letty Aronson Written and directed by Woody Allen Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Evelyn Waugh once remarked that, while reading Ulysses, one could watch James Joyce...
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James Arness
Early in June, James Arness died. Everyone thinks of him as Matt Dillon, the brave and incorruptible town marshal of Dodge City in the television series Gunsmoke. I think of him as the father of one of my childhood friends and as one of the last actors in Hollywood to have fought in World War...
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Weiners and Losers
Anthony Weiner is, in the immortal words of one Oscar-winning actress, so five minutes ago. Almost a decade and a half before the instrument of Weiner’s downfall launched on July 15, 2006, that line from one of the most perceptive films of the 1990’s presciently captured the essence of modern social media. Anyone who follows...
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Drunk at the Same Fountain
I first met Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor in the summer of 1977, in Corfu. I was on board Gianni Agnelli’s boat, and the charismatic Fiat chairman asked me to go ashore and bring “a very smart Englishman whose Ancient Greek is much better than yours.” I knew Paddy, as everyone called him, by sight, because...
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Time for Disengagment
“I’ve spent my entire adult life with the United States as a superpower, and one that had no compunction about spending what it took to sustain that position,” outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Newsweek on June 19. “[F]rankly I can’t imagine being part of a nation, part of a government . . . that’s...
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Killing No Murder
Don’t they wish they had listened to her! Back in 2003, when the United States was planning to lead the invasion of Iraq, my elderly Welsh aunt was appalled by the prospect of war: “I hate all the violence. I’m not an educated woman; I don’t understand politics. I just hate to think of all...
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Shouldering On
Atlas Shrugged: Part I Produced by The Strike Productions Directed by Paul Johansson Screenplay by John Aglialoro and Brian Patrick O’Toole from Ayn Rand’s novel Distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures Now we know: When it comes to celebrating the virtues of unbridled capitalism, it does not pay to skimp. The ten million dollars producer...
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Celebrating Diversity
The very first day I spent at a prestigious prep school—I was ten—I was punished for breaking the rule that no new boy was allowed to walk on the grass. “Rhinies,” as we were called at Lawrenceville, had to stick to the paths, and the only time we could walk on the grass was during...
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From JKF to DSK
When you ask a Russian of my generation or older about conspiracy theories, Kirov is the name that wanders into his mind as readily as the name Kennedy springs to yours. Thirty years and an ocean separate these deaths, whose aim, in both cases, was not so much the elimination of a political rival as...
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A Speech of No Consequence
All too many speeches by major political figures are heralded as historic in advance of delivery yet prove to be irrelevant in the grand-strategic scheme of things. Churchill’s “we shall fight on the beaches” address in the wake of Dunkirk, for example, and his Iron Curtain speech at Fulton six years later were rich in...
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Chuck Older
Recently, a younger acquaintance of mine, an actor on stage and screen, mentioned with disgust the circus-like atmosphere that pervaded the trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife. I noted that early on in the trial, Judge Lance Ito simply lost control of the proceedings, and the “Dream Team” of defense attorneys...
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The First and Final Command
Of Gods and Men Produced by Why Not Productions and Armada Films Directed and written by Xavier Beauvois Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Director Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men quietly, one might say austerely, meditates on the faith and courage of nine French Trappists who faced death at the hands of Muslim fanatics...
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New York State of Mind
Some 20 years ago, my friend P.J. O’Rourke came to dinner at my New York house with his new bride. She was beautiful, reserved, intelligent, and after dinner called me a male chauvinist, racist antisemite and left the house in a fury. P.J. apologized and followed his bride out. To this day I haven’t figured...
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Order No311
The document I am reading is public. It is an official directive of the Russian government to the ministries responsible for directing the country’s electronic industry, dated August 7, 2007, identified as “Government of the Russian Federation Order No311,” and entitled “Strategic Development of Electronics in Russia 2007-2025.” Last February, totalitarian power in the person...
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Our Interest in Turkey
Trying to spread democracy in the Middle East has always been a bad idea. The quagmire in Iraq is largely thanks to George W. Bush and his team extending the original mission from depriving Saddam of his (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction to the establishment of a democratic Iraq as a first step to transforming...
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The Lost Secret of Kells
When I tell you that I was recently shocked by the treatment of history in a children’s cartoon, you may wonder what kind of pompous buffoon I might be. (“I cannot begin to list the fundamental errors in marine biology that The Little Mermaid parades before our vulnerable children . . . ”) Yet watching...
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Three From the Past
Unknown Produced by Studio Canal Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra Screenplay by Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell Distributed by Warner Bros. Adjustment Bureau Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed and written by George Nolfi, adapted from “Adjustment Team,” a story by Philip K. Dick Limitless Produced and distributed by Relativity Media Directed by Neil Burger...
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Slip-Slidin’ Away
“Census data: Rockford may lose spot as Illinois’ 3rd biggest city” warned the headline in the online edition of the February 16 issue of the Rockford Register Star, announcing the initial release of data from the 2010 Census. Ten years ago, when the data from the last census was released, Rockford, with a population of...
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The Education of W
It sounds presumptuous, but I wish I had written this column in October 2002, and some eagle-eyed George W. Bush assistant would have noticed it and shown it to his moron boss. Let’s just play the What If game for a minute. Had the moron read it and taken what I’m about to write into...
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Riding the Minotaur
The townhouse at 18 Belgrave Square consisted of 74 living rooms, salons, corridors, servants’ pantries, staircases, anterooms, and closets, and in 1866 it was deemed suitable to become the new London residence of the Austrian ambassador. The commodious townhouse had gone up early in the century as part of Thomas Cubitt’s development of Belgrave Square,...
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The Libyan War
In the aftermath of September 11, President George W. Bush launched the War on Terror. It was the first war in U.S. history—declared or undeclared—against a phenomenon, a method, or an emotion, rather than against a state (or a subgroup such as the Barbary pirates or the Viet Cong). The concept evoked Xerxes’ War on...
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Egypt’s Non-Revolution
The fall of Hosni Mubarak came as a complete surprise to experts and policymakers. Why did the shadowy leading figures in Egypt’s political-military establishment, men who have profited handsomely from Mubarak’s three decades in power, risk their own power and privilege by pulling the plug on him? As Cairo returned to its chaotic daily routine,...
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Unto Them a Child Was Born
Normality is a fragile concept, and that observation is nowhere more true than in sexual matters. In making that point, I am not questioning the existence of absolute moral standards—quite the contrary. Rather, I am suggesting that, once a society loses its religious moorings, it drifts into startling novelties with a haste even more vertiginous...
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It’s a Bird
The Eagle Produced and distributed by Focus Features Directed by Kevin Macdonald Screenplay by Jeremy Brock There’s this to be said for director Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle, set in Roman-occupied Britain circa a.d. 140: It’s remarkably unpretentious. It was made for a mere $24 million at a time when even the most ordinary Hollywood...
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Free Fallin’
Rockford, Illinois, has lived through more than its share of economic downturns. The most notable, of course, was during the Reagan Recession, when one in four Rockfordians were unemployed. The city climbed up out of that trough, only to lose a number of its oldest and largest manufacturers through the frenzied rounds of mergers and...
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Our Dearest Frienemy
It is the rise of people-power all over the Muslim world, and I’ve got news for you. The people—or the street, as it’s called in places like Cairo, Manama, Sana, and Amman—are united by two things only: A loathing for the autocratic crooks who have been keeping them poor and lording it over them since...
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I’d Walk a Mile for a Hockney
On occasion I have written here about the evils of photography, while other readers of this magazine may remember my having voiced more general apprehensions with respect to the transformation undergone by the human mind in an age when, by pressing a button, a suburban housewife may proclaim herself Baudelaire or Monet. Recently, I found...
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The Eurozone: Time for a Divorce
The events of recent months present the eurozone as a dysfunctional bourgeois family, the latter-day Buddenbrooks morphing into Karamazovs. At the plot’s core is the loveless marriage of two incompatible, increasingly embittered partners. Teutonius is a rich yet parsimonious workaholic who abhors mortgages and long holidays. His much younger spouse, Meridiana, has inherited all the...
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Jumpin’ Jim Gavin
Like most kids I loved reading about Americans who rose from nothing to greatness. When I got to college and encountered my first left-wing history professor, I learned that Horatio Alger characters were pure myth—except I had already read and heard about dozens of them. One of my favorites was Jumpin’ Jim Gavin, the heroic...
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The Grit and the Gritless
True Grit Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen The Green Hornet Produced and distributed by Columbia Pictures Directed by Michel Gondry Screenplay by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg The King’s Speech Produced by See-Saw Films Directed by Tom Hooper Screenplay by David Seidler Distributed by The Weinstein...
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Oh I Wish I Was in Dixie
For a native son of the Midwest who has sympathized with the Southern states in the War of Northern Aggression for as far back as he can remember, I can see why some Southerners might find a certain justice in the impending fiscal collapse of the state that launched Abraham Lincoln, coming as it has...
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An Arab Shopping Spree
What is it with the wives of despots? Leïla Ben Ali (Baba), ex-first lady of Tunisia and a former hairdresser, makes her escape from the country her hubby and her relatives raped, but not before a brief stop at the bank where she demands and receives one-and-a-half tons of gold—worth 67 million big ones—which she...
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A Sicilian Mirage
Everybody laughed at me as usual. The state of absolute passivity outwardly resembling the comatose, but distinguishable from it by voluntary alimentation and libation, was derided by my friends as unattainable. A Sicilian mirage. Yet it had been an idée fixe for years, my vision of a holiday so impeccably philistine it would reduce me...
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The Pathology of U.S. Diplomacy
A few hours before Richard Holbrooke’s death on December 13, Hillary Clinton told a group of top U.S. diplomats at a State Department Christmas party that he was “practically synonymous with American foreign policy.” Her assessment is correct: Holbrooke’s career embodies some of its least attractive and most deeply flawed traits. Holbrooke started as a...
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Forgetting a Villian
Imagine it is the year 2030, and you are talking to some young adults. To your horror, you find that they have never heard the name Osama bin Laden. As you begin to rant about the ignorance of the young, you find to your still greater astonishment that none of your older friends have any...
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Mortal Terror
The Fighter Produced by Mark Wahlberg and David Hoberman Directed by David O. Russell Screenplay by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson Distributed by Paramount Pictures 127 Hours Produced and directed by Danny Boyle Screenplay by Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy Distributed by Fox Searchlight Mark Wahlberg produced The Fighter and convincingly plays...